The Three Questions

Abstract

Big history can give the study of religion a much-needed gift—the concept of collective learning. Studies of religion rarely examine how the phenomena we think of as “religious” contribute to collective learning. Yet, oral societies stored and managed much of their most important collective learning in myth and ritual. This chapter explores religion as a way of knowing the world—a “habit of inquiry” by which groups of people gain access to mysterious forces, such as death or natural catastrophe, as well as how they use myth and ritual to meet such social needs as creating a shared epistemology and group identity. Viewed this way, religion seems to be one of the key central habits of inquiry, which emerged interdependently as a result of the evolution of the human brain. The other two habits are what we think of as “science” and “philosophy.” By examining these habits of inquiry in the societies of Ancient Egypt and Western Modernity, this chapter offers an unconventional way of thinking about religion, its “bewildering variety” of forms, and how that variety may actually be a powerful tool for human cultural adaptation.